Many customers who visit a retail store, such as a grocery store, a department store, or a consumer electronics store, have an expectation that if the store carries an item it will be available and on a shelf for purchase. When an item is not on the shelf or otherwise at an expected location, a customer may have difficulty purchasing the item.
Many stores do not put all available inventory on the shelves for display. Instead, stores often utilize a stock room to store certain portions of the inventory, sometimes in bulk packaging. For example, a grocery store might have fifty boxes of a particular cereal, which may have been purchased and shipped in a single bulk package. The shelf location for that particular variety of cereal may only be large enough to hold ten boxes at any given time, so the remainder may be kept in the stock room. When some or all of the ten boxes are purchased by customers, the store may replenish the number of boxes available on the shelf, such as by having a stock room employee bring additional boxes out from the stock room, and placing them on the shelf.
Video monitoring systems may be used to monitor retail locations for various purposes. In particular, video monitoring systems may be used to monitor different locations within the interiors of a retail store, such as high-traffic aisles, security-sensitive areas, and the like. Video monitoring systems may also be used to monitor locations at the exteriors of a retail store, such as parking lots, loading docks, external doors, etc.
The video from a video monitoring system is sometimes monitored in real-time by store personnel to ensure that nothing out of the ordinary is occurring in the monitored locations. For example, the video of a high-traffic aisle in a retail store may be monitored in real-time and if a spill or some other accident occurs the person monitoring the video might ask a store associate to go to the location to help with the accident. The captured video from a video monitoring system can also be stored, for example in a video archive, for later viewing and analysis. Stored video may allow store personnel to study a situation that has occurred in the past, for example, to determine the cause of a particularly interesting situation or to determine how the situation was remedied.